Then a couple of girls at the other end of the cafeteria started screaming and crying, looking at their cell phones, loudly announcing that Sam Warner had been found dead.
Emma wasn’t surprised at what they were crying about.
She was just surprised it had taken so long.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The rest of Jessica’s Wednesday went by in a foggy blur as she tried to keep awake and aware by having one more cup of coffee and then a Diet Coke at lunch. Ellen Nickerson spent most of the day in her office. Rhonda and Amber whispered and gossiped during the afternoon, and when the lobby was clear of customers on this rainy day, their voices got louder as they talked about Sam’s death. Percy ignored them all and stayed on his stool by the drive-up window.
In the late afternoon Amber took an iPad from her large purse and called up the home page of the Warner Daily News, and Jessica was stunned at how quickly the newspaper had uploaded a story onto its digital front page.
Amber read the first two paragraphs aloud as Jessica and Rhonda gathered around her. Percy was content to stay put and play Tetris on his iPhone.
In a quivering voice, Amber read, “‘Warner Police and Massachusetts State Police are investigating the apparent homicide of eighteen-year-old Samuel Warner, a senior at Warner High School and the captain of its winning wrestling team. Warner’s body was discovered at approximately nine A.M. by two local residents going for a walk along the many trails in the Warner Town Forest. The Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office is taking the lead on the investigation. Details of his death and its approximate time have not been released by authorities.’”
Amber wiped her eyes and said, “Oh, God, poor Sam. And his poor family.”
Jessica leaned closer and took a better look on the iPad screen, seeing the smiling, cocky face of the young Sam Warner, wearing his letter jacket. Jessica had seen him a few times at the track meets when other student athletes gathered to cheer on their classmates, joined by his family, who had first come to this area nearly four hundred years ago and lent their name to the town.
Rhonda said, “I mean, he was so popular. Who would want to kill him?”
And from the drive-up came the voice of Percy Prescott, whose head was still lowered as he played Tetris. “Take your pick,” he said. “The guy was a real dick.”
Jessica was shocked at hearing that from Percy, and so were Rhonda and Amber. Amber’s face reddened and she said, “How in hell can you say such a rotten thing?”
“Easy.” Percy lifted his head, and there was a hard gaze Jessica had never seen before from the usually quiet and cheerful Percy. “I was two years ahead of him in school, and he and his little wrestlers loved to shit on people they thought didn’t fit in. They’d fuck with their lockers, knock their books out of their hands in the hallways and in the bathrooms. They were nasty little bastards, they were.”
Jessica remembered Craig telling her last night about the wrestling team meeting up with him and Emma just outside the school. The two of us got jumped by our own little group of alt-right clowns—the wrestling team—and they decided to have fun with us.
She refused to think anymore about Craig’s words.
No, just no.
Emma had said that Craig was exaggerating. That’s all. Emma had to be right. Had to be.
A dark-blue Mercedes sedan slowed up and stopped, and Percy pushed the teller drawer out. “Once the cops start investigating, they’ll have more suspects than they’ll know what to do with,” he said.
Jessica’s shift ended at 4:00 P.M., and as she cashed out and submitted the day’s paperwork, she just wanted to go to the ladies’ room, empty her bladder of all the caffeine she had drunk, and pick up Emma from track practice. She also planned a serious one-on-one with her daughter to really find out what Emma and her stepbrother had been up to last night.
A scavenger hunt? For real?
Then the day got even crappier.
Waiting in the lobby, pacing back and forth, then quickly coming over to her closed teller station, was Ted. His face was tired, flabby, but there was something scary and pleading in his eyes.
“Hey, what’s up?” Jessica asked, going over to her station. Ted hardly ever came to the bank, and never when she was about to leave.
He looked left and then right—where Rhonda and Amber were taking care of customers—and leaned over the counter. “I need to talk to you. Right now.”
Something cold seemed to seize her lower legs, freezing her in place. The tone of his voice, the pleading look in his eyes, meant that something was seriously wrong. “I can be home in fifteen minutes or so, Ted, after I pick up Emma from school. Can’t it wait until then?”
“No, it can’t.”
“Ted—”
“We need to talk. Now. It’s about the kids.”
That last sentence nailed her. It’s about the kids.
Jessica leaned over the counter and saw that the door to Ellen’s office was still closed. “Come along.”
It was against bank rules to allow nonbank personnel to come into work areas, but that rule was ignored as much as the one about taking home pens, pencils, and paperclips for personal use. She unlocked the chest-high side door, stepped into the lobby, and led Ted down the short corridor that went past Ellen’s office and an office used by one of their ghost employees. The ghosts were young men or women who helped with mortgages, money market accounts, wire transfers, and other bits of complicated banking and who stayed here for three or four months before getting transferred to a bigger branch. No one ever bothered to learn much about them beyond their names.
There was a quick left, past the supply closet—her right shoulder ached again at the memory of moving all those heavy boxes yesterday—and she led her husband into the break room. Thankfully the room was empty. Jessica closed the door. She sat down across from Ted at the small table and held her hands together underneath so he couldn’t see them start to tremble.
Never had she seen him so frightened, even including last night.
“What’s wrong?” she managed to ask.
He blinked his eyes, shook his head, reached into his coat pocket, and took out an iPhone. “Jessica, I’m sorry, I’ve been keeping a secret from you for more than a year.”
She had a feeling as if she were going into the cellar with the light off, of stepping down and not finding the step. Disoriented, as if she were about to fall into the darkness.
A secret? For more than a year?
“Ted, what secret? You’re not making any sense.”
He raised a hand, cut her off. “It’s about Emma. And Craig.” He took a deeper breath. “I’m sorry. I should have checked with you before I did it. I was only going to do it with Craig, but I didn’t think that was fair to him. So I did it to Emma at the same time.”
Under the break-room table, Jessica clenched her clasped hands into fists. Emma?
“Ted, I don’t understand.” And right then she hated the tone of her voice. It was that of a confused housewife, a plain old bank teller, a woman who had never gone to college and didn’t have the right smarts.
He placed the iPhone on the table, turned it so she could see the screen. “Last spring, when that young girl was kidnapped from Lawrence and it took a month before her body came up in the Merrimack, I decided to do something about it.”
She remembered that appalling story and looked down at his iPhone. It was a detailed map of something, showing roads, trails, a stream . . .
Ted asked, “You heard about Sam Warner being found dead?”
“Of course.”
“His body was found deep in the Warner Town Forest. I talked to Detective Josephs, a friend of mine from Rotary. He was in a rush and told me Sam had been shot. Preliminary time of death was sometime last night.”
The coffee and Coke she had drunk that was still in her stomach was churning and threatening to come out violently, all over this dirty table and Ted’s clean suit and tie.
Ted had tears i
n his eyes. A thick finger tapped the glass screen of the iPhone.
“Hon, last year, after the Lawrence girl story, I secretly put tracking software on both of the kids’ phones. It’s buried deep in their apps, disguised as some sort of weather station software. I was being paranoid, I know, but teenage kids in these times . . . and it didn’t cost much . . .”
She said, “What? And you’ve kept this secret from me all this time?”
Ted said, “I should have told you. I know. But after I did it, I waited a day. Then another day. A week. Pretty soon so much time had passed I didn’t want to bring it up. I never thought . . . Oh, Jesus.”
Jessica held her breath, hoping it would calm her stomach, steady her nerves, do something, anything, even block out what her husband was saying.
“Jessica, our kids were in the Warner Town Forest last night. When the cops think Sam Warner was murdered.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
There were times in Jessica Thornton’s life when she could remember in excruciating detail past experiences, even though she easily forgot daily tasks like going to Hannaford’s to pick up some milk and orange juice or swinging by the Warner post office to mail out some bills. She still remembered her first sleepovers with Kristin Young, her neighborhood friend in Haverhill, when she had realized there were families in which Mom and Dad didn’t yell at each other after dinner. And that fumbling, painful, yet pleasurable night when she had lost her virginity to Bobby. The time in the hospital in Newburyport when she held the red-faced, squealing little girl and knew for certain that she was instantly in love with her daughter. The night she got the phone call to tell her that Bobby had died in a drunk-driving crash. And the hopeful day she married Ted more than three years ago, filled with desire that her life was finally going to turn around and mean something for her and her girl.
Now, this instant, this time, would join that list of never-to-be-forgotten moments.
“Ted, what do you mean?”
He tapped his finger again on the screen. “See? The red letters C and E? They mark the locations of Craig’s and Emma’s cell phones. Last night, for nearly thirty minutes, they were here.” Another tap of the finger. “This is a stream in the middle of the town forest. And this is where a wooden footbridge is. And that’s where Detective Josephs told me they found the body of Sam Warner.”
Ted drew his hand back and Jessica saw it quiver. “For God’s sake, what do we do now?” he said.
Jessica wished at that moment that somebody, anybody—even Ellen Nickerson, the Ice Queen—would come in and break this mood, this terror, the cold feelings running up and down her back. Good Lord, even a bank robbery would be a wonderful gift at this moment.
“But last night, when we were looking for them, why didn’t you see them on your iPhone?”
“I couldn’t access the program because the damn software was being updated or something. Jessica, what do we do?”
That question just hung in the dead air of her bank’s break room. Ted, who had all the answers, who thought he knew everything, was coming to her for help.
It was a dizzying change.
“We need to talk to them again,” Jessica finally said. “Last night they both told us that they were out on some sort of scavenger hunt. That it started around eleven. That they lost track of the time. We need to ask them again. We need to make sure what went on.”
Ted rubbed at his face. “Jesus, Jessica. Okay, let’s get them both together later tonight and we’ll talk it out.”
Jessica said, “Okay.”
“I mean, I don’t want to think of what this might mean, you know? If this . . .”
Jessica made a point of looking up at the break-room clock. She didn’t want to keep talking; she didn’t want to see where this conversation might lead. She just knew she had to get out of this room.
“Ted, I need to get going. I’m picking up Emma after track practice. I’m sorry. When does Craig get home?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
Ted said, “Sometime after four thirty, I think.”
Jessica said, “When I pick up Emma, we’ll head home. Then we can talk to them both and see what we can find out.”
Ted nodded, looked up at the clock. “All right. But Jessica, don’t talk to Emma beforehand, okay?”
That last comment concerned her. “What?”
Ted said, “You shouldn’t tell Emma about the tracking software. I won’t tell Craig either. It’ll be better if we talk to Craig and her together, so we can see how they both react. You see what I mean?”
Jessica said, “Okay, that does make sense.”
Ted looked again at the clock. “Christ, I gotta go, too. We’ll see what we can learn later.” He stood up, let out a big sigh, and shook his head. “There has to be a simple explanation, you know? A real good one. Maybe something to do with that scavenger hunt. Otherwise . . . I mean, I felt like passing out when I saw where they had been last night.”
Jessica stood up, rubbed at her bare arms. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
He came around the break-room table and opened his arms, and Jessica slid against him, accepting the tight hug. He kissed her cheek and said, “I know things haven’t been great these past few months, hon, but we can get through this. As a family. If we just stick together. Okay?”
She hugged him back, her voice choking, and said, “Absolutely. We need to stick together. As a family. And you’re right. There has to be an explanation.”
Back in her work area, Ted slipped into the lobby and turned and gave her a wave. Jessica waved back. From her teller station Amber said, “Jessica, your hubby is so sweet, stopping by like that. I hope someday my hubby will do the same thing.”
“I know—I am lucky, aren’t I?” Jessica replied, almost saying, And you should hope your future hubby never, ever has to break news like Ted just did.
As she went to get her purse from under her teller station, the branch’s telephone rang. Rhonda picked up.
“Hey, Jessica, there’s a phone call for you.”
She said, “Do you know who it is?”
Rhonda shook her head. “It’s a guy, that’s all.”
Jessica slung her purse over her sore shoulder and went to the end of the teller area, where a phone was set up on the wall, next to the printer and fax machine for the tellers. She picked up.
“Hello?”
A man’s voice came at her quickly, and she recognized it from the phone message she had deleted yesterday and from the message also erased last Friday. “Mrs. Thornton, please don’t hang up. Please. If you hang up, it’ll make it hard for you and your daughter. I really don’t want that to happen.”
She squeezed the black receiver hard. “Go on.”
Jessica could hear the relief in the man’s voice. “Thank you. And I mean it, thank you.”
“Could you hurry up, please? I have an appointment I’m about to miss.”
“Certainly,” he said. “My name is Gary Talbot. I’m a private investigator from Portland. I’ve been hired to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of your first husband, Robert Thornton.”
The way Talbot said the name, she was sure he was mistaken. Robert Thornton? Nobody ever called him that. He was always Bobby Thornton, Bobby the Trusted One, seen in newspaper ads, heard in radio spots, and also spotted late at night on some of the more obscure cable channels in the area, trying to sell cars, like some odd creature from those old Mutual of Omaha television shows.
“What circumstances?” she asked. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. My husband, Bobby”—she put a choking sound in her voice—“he died in a car accident on I-95, just outside York. Several years ago. The state police and the York police both said he was drunk and struck a deer, went off the road and hit a tree.”
Talbot said, “Well, that’s what the reports say, and the medical examiner’s paperwork states the same thing. But I’ve been asked to look into this f
urther.”
“Who asked you?”
“That’s confidential, Mrs. Thornton.”
Jessica made a quick turn and saw that the three other tellers—Rhonda, Amber, and Percy—were all working very, very hard to pretend that they weren’t listening.
“Mr. Talbot,” she said, “if you want my cooperation, you need to tell me who hired you. Or I won’t say a word.”
There was silence, and then Percy’s drive-up drawer clattered out, and Talbot said, “Well, you’re going to learn eventually. I was hired by Grace Thornton.”
Grace? Who the hell was Grace Thornton? Jessica then recalled the name and the face it was attached to. A teenage girl, Bobby’s youngest sister, who always sat away from everyone else at family events, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and who always looked at Jessica with pure, unadulterated hatred. She loved her older brother and hated Jessica for marrying him.
Grace . . . she must have been seventeen or so when Bobby died. Now she was in her twenties, and like a dish best served cold, she was coming after the woman she thought had taken her brother away. But why? Why now?
“Grace?” she asked. “Grace Thornton? Bobby’s younger sister?”
“That’s right.”
“But . . .” Jessica closed her eyes. Took a deep breath, tried to keep her legs still. She wanted so much to hang up on this man, ignore him like she had ignored his two earlier messages. And she remembered what the private investigator had said earlier: If you hang up, it’ll make it hard for you and your daughter.
She couldn’t let that happen.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll talk to you. I . . . I promise I’ll call you tomorrow. Perhaps we could set up a time to talk face-to-face? I don’t feel comfortable talking like this over the phone.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Thornton,” he said. “That sounds quite reasonable.”
He slowly gave her his phone number, and with a spare pen nearby Jessica scribbled it down on a torn deposit slip. She read the number back to him, and then she asked, “Mr. Talbot, I’m sorry to ask you this, but why did Grace Thornton hire you? What on earth is she looking for?”
You Will Never Know Page 4